WordNet class needs Updating

Chris Nelson xradionut at mac.com
Fri Nov 25 20:45:55 UTC 2005


Stef,

After browsing the Squeak Map, I found a package that already 
implements the DICT protocol! Ram Krishnan has a implemented 
DictionaryBrowser which works quite well in my standard Squeak 3.8. So 
the hard work has already been done. :) I'm going to poke around the 
classes and see how Ram implemented this.

Since Squeak is being targeted to and used by children and those of us 
with imperfect language skills, maybe someone could evaluate this a 
replacement for some of the WordNet functionality in the standard 
Squeak distribution if it is appropriate.

Chris



On Nov 23, 2005, at 3:02 AM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

> good.
> Keep us informed and do not hesitate to ask any questions that you 
> think may be silly :)
>
> Stef
>
> On 22 nov. 05, at 23:39, Chris Nelson wrote:
>
>> Marcus,
>>
>> Thanks for your reply.
>>
>> After further examination of the code, I did determine that the 
>> current WordNet methods do rely on "page-scraping" to get the 
>> responses. It appears that most WordNet clients download the database 
>> and and the APIs provided by the site to offer a independent WordNet 
>> service instead of querying the site. I do agree that the current 
>> WordNet code is broken and should probably be removed from Squeak. It 
>> would be nice to have something to replace it with. I did some 
>> research and found there is a online dictionary protocol, DICT as 
>> described in RFC 2229 and some projects that support this:
>>
>> http://www.dict.org/links.html
>> http://www.freedict.org/en/
>>
>> Many of the DICT servers online also offer WordNet access in addition 
>> to other resources. There are free clients and servers available and 
>> I did realize that I do have the OmniDictionary client and the 
>> DICTatoro server on my local OS X computer.  So instead of 
>> replicating what the WordNet class in Squeak 3.8 is now, I may try to 
>> see if I can create a DICT client with similar functionality. Wish me 
>> luck, since I'm new to Smalltalk, OO and network protocols. I will 
>> probably examine the code from some of the Python client, since that 
>> is the language I'm most familiar with.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> On Nov 22, 2005, at 6:15 AM, Marcus Denker wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> because the wordnet code is broken, I have removed it from 3.9a.
>>>
>>> If you are interested, you could take the code from 3.8 and put it
>>> on squeaksource to be developed further as a standalone package.
>>> (i did not do that as nobody seemed to care about wordnet).
>>>
>>>       Marcus
>>>
>>> On 21.11.2005, at 23:47, Chris Nelson wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi all!
>>>>
>>>> I'm new to Squeak, so I'm going thru the environment and the 
>>>> browser and trying random stuff that interest me.
>>>>
>>>> Tried using WordNet to get a definition and Scamper gets redirected 
>>>> to a new URL. I don't think this is a bug, just something that 
>>>> needs to be updated and tested.
>>>>
>>>> The new URL is http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn and it 
>>>> appears form the page uses has different variables.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Chris Nelson, aka xradionut
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>




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